Varia #3
Varia considered this with the genuine attention she gave to genuine questions. She looked at the garrison—the soldiers in the yard, at the walls, at the Zhaduun Mountains visible beyond the eastern gate. All of it.
“No,” she said. “It does not get easier. But it gets clearer.” She drank. “You understand what you are doing and why. You stop asking whether it is worth it.”
“And what are you doing?” I asked. “What is the thing you understand?”
“We burn against the darkness. That’s what this garrison is. That’s what the line is.” She turned the flask once in her hand before sealing it. “It isn’t complicated. It’s just the truth.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, in the flat tone of someone stating a fact they had long stopped being angry about, she said, “Newardia sent half our requested reinforcements last rotation. The dispatch before that, a third. The supply chain runs six weeks behind schedule in winter.”
She looked at the mountains.
“They declared victory forty years ago. They went home. They built the outpost line and staffed it, and they tell themselves the problem is contained.”
She sighed.
“They are not wrong. The problem is contained. What they do not think about is who is doing the containing, or what it costs. They do not think about how long the people doing it are out here, fighting to hold back this threat. We do not hold this line because Newardia is watching. We hold it because if we don’t, those villages burn. That is the whole calculation.”
She sealed the flask.
“We hold the line. Not for glory. Not for recognition. Not because anyone in Newardia is going to remember our names.”
Her eyes went to the soldiers running drills in the cold, to the walls that had been absorbing assault for decades.
Her chin lifted slightly.
“There are many people who sleep through the night because this line holds.”
She let that sit, simple as the rest.
“It is for them.”
“We burn against the darkness,” I said, turning the words over, feeling their weight.
I glanced past the yard, as if I might see what lay beyond it, though there was nothing but distance.
I looked back at her.
“There’s something in that. The idea that it doesn’t have to drive the dark away everywhere. Only here. Only enough.”
I looked at her. At the blue eyes and the sharp face and the dark hair loose in the morning air. At the woman who had been inside this war since she was sixteen and had arrived at a settled understanding of what she was doing in it.
“Now,” she said, standing and capping her flask. “Weapons.”
She handed me a practice sword—wooden, weighted to approximate the real thing, worn smooth by years of hands. She took one herself and faced me with relaxed readiness.
“Scipio has shown you the basics,” she said. “I am going to revise some of what Scipio showed you.”
“He will love hearing that.”
“What he showed you is correct for his body and his training. You do not have his body. You do not have his training. You do not move the way he moves, and you should not try to. He fights with mass and authority. You are going to fight with speed and precision. They are equally effective. They require different techniques.”
When Varia looked at me again, the professional distance was gone.
“You are fast. Faster than you currently know. And you think before you act, which most fighters consider a weakness. I consider it an asset you have not yet learned to use. Your mind is not an obstacle to fighting. It is the thing that will eventually make you better at it than people who have been doing it longer.”
I received this. I did not deflect it or qualify it.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded once.
We trained.
She demonstrated a stance—narrower than Skip’s, weight distributed forward, the sword held at an angle that prioritized speed over power. She moved through two strikes and a defensive sequence.
My version was not like that.
The grip was wrong first.
Varia adjusted it without comment, repositioning my hands with brisk, focused attention. The stance was better. The first strike was clumsy but directionally correct. The second less clumsy.
“Again,” she said.
We ran the sequence. My arm ached in a way that introduced me to muscles I had not previously been aware of having. The leather absorbed the sweat without complaint. The fingerless gloves did the job they were designed for.
At some point, Varia stopped telling me to adjust anything and watched.
She called a halt.
She looked at me with something that had not been there at the start of the morning.
“The grip will be correct in two weeks,” she said. “The stance in three. The shoulder guards in three months.”
I looked at the practice sword in my hand. At the leather that sat slightly loose but not as loose as it had felt at the start of the morning, as though the hours of wearing it had already begun to shape itself to me.
“Same time tomorrow?” I asked.
She took the practice sword from me and returned it to the rack with care.
“Same time every day,” she said with a smile.
She walked toward the garrison. I stood in the training yard in the leather that was slightly too large and watched her go. The yard was quiet.
Velox was back in his stall, visible through the stable door.
I turned back toward the keep.